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Just looked up one of my kid's teachers: couldn't believe GBW has 21 Special Ed teachers and 13 World Language teachers. OMG the riches this school has to be able to afford their salaries and future pensions.

My mother is a sub teacher at Prospect HS and has been for 35 years. She brought up an interesting point to me, the number of students 35 years ago was about 2,000 and today it's about the same.

However, the size of the teacher's parking lot has more than doubled. I bet this is the case in D41 & D87.

It's not just the massive pension costs, but the shear increase in the numbers of staff that makes up the huge costs.

I wonder if your mom would say that 35 years ago the student body was much more homogeneous and not nearly requiring the number of special education and other instructors that are 'normal' today? When I went to school decades ago, no such things as IEPs, gifted programs, least restrictive environment needs for kids with various challenges, etc.
(ok, there was AP, but nothing really much at the grammar school level way back when - 60 kids in a class at a parochial school).

Some owners at our condo associated requested we stripe the visitor parking pads (formerly just blacktop for over 30 years). Ok, fine, seemed reasonable to placate some owners. Who ended up unhappy. Due to new codes, where four cars could fit (well, mid to small cars), we could only provide legal parking for three cars with the nice new stripes.

Still kind of think comparing faculty/student needs from 40 years ago to today may be not quite apples to oranges.

Cars and trucks used to be as big as boats. Then compact car spaces became vogue during the energy crisis. Tiny little parking spots that people with tiny little cars were afraid to park in for fear that car door next to them, which weren't as tiny as the cars, would ding into theirs when opened.

Then those compact spaces went the way of dinosaurs when SUV's got popular. Big was in. So totally believable that the number of spots available would shrink as vehicles got bigger again, and lots needed to be larger to accommodate the big SUV's.

I think you are correct. In my Acura I amost feel very small driving from our house to downtown in Sebring FL. Not scary or bad just a busy busy highway! If I have ample time I can take back roads to avoid US 27.